I was thinking the other day about how odd it is that political campaigns are treated mainly as conflicts in ideology, personality, and party affinity, when they’re basically job interviews…and before I could really get into that idea, even in the privacy of my own head, it struck me how absurd this political campaign has been in yet another way. Because I pictured Donald Trump interviewing for a job the same way he’s been running for President.

“Hi, it’s really great to be here, because I’m an amazing guy and I’m going to do a great job for you. Although I will say I’ve been treated very unfairly here–I mean, I don’t need this job. I’m very rich, I’m very successful, but all of my close personal friends have been saying how badly you’re running this business and how much you need me, so I decided to apply. And nobody here has given me the respect I deserve for that. But I’m a very big-hearted man, so I’ll let it go, but if you want me to continue this interview, you’re going to have to be more polite. That’s all I’m saying.

“Anyway, the point is, this business is gonna be yuuuge with me in charge. I’m a very smart man, I have great ideas, I’m going to build a big wall around your business to keep out all the riff-raff–you know, all the rapists and murderers that are just everywhere, and all the terrorists, I’m not gonna be afraid to say ‘radical Islam’ to your customers, your suppliers, pretty much everyone. I’m gonna be strong. Customers respect strength. If they bring in a coupon for 10% off, I might just decide to charge ’em double. Or kick ’em out of the building and kill their families. You can’t let people laugh at you. Everyone’s laughing at you right now, all of them, and you have to stop it.

“You should probably give guns to all your employees. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they were always armed, so they could defend themselves no matter where they went? I mean, in bars, while drinking, wherever. Guns are awesome. I have a gun, you know. I mean, I don’t need it, because everyone loves me, but if anyone did try anything, I could kill them. I’m very tough. Your other applicants, they don’t think I’m tough, they’ve been saying mean things about me, but that’s just because they’re all losers. Some of them, I think, should probably be in jail. But I’m not here to talk about them, because they’re all losers who should be in prison and I’m really the best candidate for this job.

“I’m the best candidate because I’m such a great businessman. I know everything about business. I ran a whole bunch of businesses, and I made money on all of them. Even the ones that went bankrupt. Some pathetic losers will make a big deal about all those bankruptcies, but they don’t know business the way I do and you don’t either. You probably need me to educate you in business. I run a few seminars, if you’ve got $45,000 to spare…but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about me. Because I’m a very smart guy, did I mention that? I’m very smart, I’m very successful, I’m very strong, and my fingers? Well, let’s just say there’s no problems there.

“I can already tell this interview is going great. I’m winning this interview. I’m winning it so much, I may just get tired of winning and quit the job before I even get it. I may decide once I have the job to hire someone to do the job while I get on with the important job of being me, which is very important because I’m such a great guy. I’m certainly going to make sure that once I get this job, everyone respects me. I’ll make it pretty damn tough on anyone who works here who doesn’t understand how great I am, believe me. That’s because I’m strong and I deserve respect.

“See, you’re calling for the security guards right now. I could kill them in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still love me–not that I would, but I could if I wanted to. I could also punch them, I’d really like to hit them but my good friends, they told me to let them drag me out of the building, they said that I needed to be the bigger man here, not like my enemies who should all be in jail because they’re losers, you should be kicking them out and not me, I’ll be back the next time you have a job opening, I know you’ll miss me…”

“Government as business” is a seductive analogy, but it does tend to obscure certain important distinctions. When a business fails, that’s a huge problem for the employees, but they are generally not in immediate danger of death by famine, plague, or bloody purges by the death squads of other businesses, and that’s all thanks to the safety net of government. If the government fails, there’s no safety net.

If your company goes nuts and hires a manifestly unqualified, unstable, autocratic CEO, you’ll still be able to shop around for another job. If your country goes nuts, shopping around for alternatives is a lot more difficult for most people.

Finally, while Donald Trump may have successfully navigated numerous bankruptcies over the years, it’s worth considering that none of these companies had access to nuclear weapons.

@JoeX: I think you misunderstood me slightly. Nate Silver wasn’t giving him 40% of the vote, he was giving him a 40% chance of getting more than 50% of the electoral college. IIRC, he was giving Romney similar numbers around this time last election. Or maybe that was after that first debate when everyone lost their minds because Romney actually put in a credible showing.

Thinking of it, I will only be worried if Trump does pull off a good debate performance. I feel he only did well at the Republican debates because he couldn’t be attacked on his positions, out of fear of alienating the sort of voter who would vote for Trump. That will be less of a problem for Hillary, I would hope.

@JCG: I don’t _think_ so. I mean, it’s certainly far closer than I’d like it at this point, thanks in no small part to the Republicans having so thoroughly salted the earth against the prospect of a Hillary presidency (it’s sad that this is literally the campaign they’ve been preparing to fight for twenty-five years, and they’re fucking it up by nominating a giant orange Cheeto wearing a dead muskrat)…but Trump is incapable of self-censorship, and he’s a bottomless pit of stupidity and hate. At some point, I think that’s got to stop being something he can overcome.

@William Kendall: Writing as Trump is easy. Just make sure every sentence either starts with “I”, or contains as subject the word me, or is about how everyone who isn’t Trump isn’t as good as Trump. He’s an unrepentant narcissist.

@damanoid: I think the bigger problem with “government as business” is that the two have different goals. A business exists to make as much money as possible–providing a good or service is merely a means to convince people to give you money. A perfect business spends as little money as possible while collecting as much money as possible.

Whereas a government exists to provide the goods and services. The money is merely a means to cover the expenses incurred in providing them. A perfect government spends as much money as possible while collecting as little money as possible.

(Note the “as possible”. Obviously, a business can’t provide too little and a government can’t spend too much, or people won’t stand for either one. The goal of a business is to find that perfect point of equilibrium where you’re charging as much as possible while still keeping your customers satisfied, and providing as little as possible while still keeping your customers satisfied. The goal of a government is to do as much as you can without making people feel oppressed, while taking as little from them as you can without careening into destabilizing debt.)

John, you left out the following:
“Who are those guys? Oh, they’re nobody. They just follow me around and sometimes they give me a hand with stuff. Sometimes money. They’re great. Why are they speaking Russian? Probably because they’re from the Ukraine or something. I dunno, but they have a great thing going over there. I hope they like me. And maybe occasionally they do some things that might be considered ‘illegal’, but they’re just so great, such wonderful people. I think it would be even more wonderful, so incredible if they hacked your email server. That was a joke. I really hope they like me.”

I appreciate the humor, but Trump is a bigger threat than a lot of people want to accept.

1. He’s a master salesman. That is literally his only skill. While John did a pretty good job capturing the spirit of Trump, he missed the rhythm and that’s actually pretty important. When Trump talks, listen sometime. He never uses a word with more syllables than is needed. He’ll say “California” instead of San Bernadino, for example, even when listing Orlando in the same breath (because Orlando has fewer syllables than Florida). And he will always try to end a sentence in a dynamic strong word. (“My phrases always end in words that are strong,” is how he might say that). He never uses passive tense. He never rises above a 4th grade reading level. It’s almost like brainwashing.

2. Most poor, white people in the country have a huge axe to grind. They look around and say, “We’re poor. We get made fun of. We’re discriminated against. And no one says anything about it just ’cause we’re white.” And to a degree, they’re right. There is a condescension toward poor white people in the U.S. and Trump is riding the rail of resentment. They don’t like traditional GOP praise for big business (because most of them have been laid off by those “job creators”) and they’re tired of being told by the Democrats that black and Latino Americans have it so hard off, and especially that some of the jobs that they’ve traditionally worked (coal mining, oil and some manufacturing) aren’t coming back and are probably bad for the nation. And they don’t want a hand out. So when Trump says, “We’re losing on trade. We need to win.” They may not believe him, but he’s at least saying something that makes them think he might want to have that conversation.

3. Bill Clinton. The guy is well liked personally, and I think it’s because a lot of his crap policies stuck to Hillary. His triangulating, “third way” moderate centrist ways are why a lot of people on the left don’t like the Clinton name. But for some reason, either sexism, or because she stayed in politics after he left, that brand has stuck to Hillary. I, myself, took a long time to come around even a little bit, and it’s because I kept subconsciously getting my Clintons confused.

4. Bad media coverage is going to dog Hillary. Trump lies so often that it’s not a news story any more. The media won’t report that, or if they do, they’ll do a mealy-mouthed “they both do it” sort of story. And it’s a false equivalency, but they’ll do it anyway. Hillary’s record, according to Politifact, is 73% half-true or better. Trump is the inverse, almost, at 70% mostly false, false or pants-on-fire false. But the media has a narrative, “Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy” and “Donald Trump says outrageous things that we all sort of agree with,” and they’re not going to let something so inconsequential as reality get in the way of their narrative.

@Sisyphus: That fourth point reminds me of a study they did. They presented two people with the exact same traits, except one was female, one was male. The male was thought to be a good leader. The female was thought to be a bitch.

The fact that Hillary is leading at all is a testament to how much thought she has put into her career as a politician.

It’s like Trump, as a candidate, was specially designed to exploit false equivalencies. His flaws are so concentrated and so extreme, and most of them are really just a subset of “he is actually intentionally evil,” it’s just not possible to state the problems with Trump in a way that can’t be handwaved away with “yeah but pantsuit.”

@Chris: There’s also the fact that it takes hours to debunk a lie. You have to gather evidence, you have to look up facts, you have to cite sources. In the time it takes to do that, Trump’s already told another 15 (10 of which he recognizes are lies, 5 of which are just things he’s ignorant of, but doesn’t care about).

When Hillary tells a lie, you have to go after that too. But since you can’t keep up with the raw sewage flood out of Trump, it ends up looking, in the mass media, like both are lying about the same amount of time. Because it’s unprofessional of journalists to say, “Also these other 14 things Trump said are lies, but come on…I just…I just can’t anymore.”

However, I’m hopeful, now, that with him insulting the family of a fallen Army captain (and intentionally keeping that story in the news because…ego?) and kicking out not just protesters, but babies who have the audacity to cry at his rallies, that the more sane GOP people recognize what a dumpster fire he is.